182 Quotes by Bill McKibben

It ensured that I’d never think that patriotism and dissent were opposites.

We’ve been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.

So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it’s the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can’t solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.

Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say.

The single most inhospitable cubic meter of the Earth’s surface – some waste of Saharan sand, some rocky Himalayan outcrop – is a thousand times more hospitable that the most appealing corner of Mars or Jupiter.

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.

Day to day, we forget that if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilizations began about a fifth of a second ago.

A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope – the only obligation is honesty...

We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity.